Jamie Foxx Turns Vigilante For Law Abiding Citizen

Jamie Foxx is taking a page out of Denzel Washington’s career handbook. The Oscar-winning actor, who will next be seen alongside Robert Downey, Jr. in this November’s The Soloist, has reportedly signed onto another mismatched rival flick, Law Abiding Citizen,opposite Gerard Butler. In the film, Mr. Foxx will play a grieving man who turns vigilante after one of the men who murdered his family gets freed thanks to a plea bargain. Mr. Butler would play the Assistant D.A. who ends up in Mr. Foxx’s crosshairs.

Let us take a guess: Law Abiding Citizen ends with a tearful Jamie Foxx having an epiphany that by killing those people responsible for murdering his family, he’s become just as monstrous as them. Snore! We’ve seen this movie before. So why are we even the least bit interested? Because Frank Darabont is directing, that’s why!

Mr. Darabont, forever owner of a lifetime pass thanks to The Shawshank Redemption, has been in a rut for nearly a decade. The Green Mile, The Majestic and The Mist were all pretty average. Meanwhile, his unused script for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was surprisingly not much different from the finished product (read: not good). However, the idea of Mr. Darabont taking his specific brand of old-fashioned storytelling to a modern-day genre film sounds great. We won’t make a judgment on Law Abiding Citizen just yet, but we’ll certainly be following its progress. As they say, hope is a good thing. (Cue the Shawshank music!)